Things are a-changing…

Ten years ago, this October, The Hubbs and I bought our first house together.

In that time, we’ve seen many of the original owners of almost each of the houses on our street move onto “bigger and better” houses.

Right now, our current next door neighbours are in the midst of packing up a moving trailer. Their house has been on the market for about a month now, but I am unsure as to whether it has sold to new owners yet. There’s been one couple(?) that has come back to see the house twice in the past week, so there’s a possibility the house has sold, but I haven’t been outside to see if the “For Sale” sign now reads “Sold”.

I’m a little sad about our Chinese neighbours moving. For one, they’ve been pretty low key and have mostly kept to themselves. Even with two kids and a few neighbourhood urchins, they’ve always been highly respectful of the fact that there’s no backyard fence between our houses. To be honest, we’ve been totally okay with the kids moseying into our side of the yard to play and it’s been fun watching the two boys grow. The Chinese family is actually the second set of owners of this house.

The original owner was a bachelor that worked graveyard shifts as a nurse and kept almost exclusively to himself but found he didn’t want a big house afterall. He was married when he bought the place, but apparently the relationship went sour only 2 months after taking posession of the house. He did try getting a roommate for a period of time, but he was this creepy old unemployed guy that took cash for oddjobs here and there. He had a cat. I remember he used to let it roam the backyard whihle he sat out in the sun in a lawn chair and it would eventually settle down in the shade of his chair.

I am kind of sad. The street has changed – we don’t know anybody on our street since no one is the original owner of the houses they’ve all moved into, and people aren’t friendly enough to say hi and introduce themselves. When we first moved in 10 years ago, everyone knew who everyone else was.

I guess I’m just hoping that whoever buys next door’s place is nice, friendly and maybe dog-free… Only because we have no fence between our properties still and we kind of like int that way. It makes both yards seem immeasureably larger, which is kind of nice on the eyes.